- Architosh Staff ([email protected])
- 00 Feb 2002
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Apple Server: Specs on Render Farm, Sci/Tech Server | It is very much inline with recently announced news that Pixar is moving to OS X and (and consistent with our reports on Apple targeting the Hollywood FX market) that Apple has a serious server planned for some serious number crunching. Below are anticipated specs on a rackmount server for Render Farms, Graphics and Video. | | Render Farm Aside from the obvious small business Web server market where Linux and MS IIS servers are too complicated to manage, it is believed that Apple is interested in courting the Hollywood studios with serious hardware and Mac OS X. In that light, a 'render farm' machine would have maximum megaflops per board or cabinet and would provide that power at a better Megaflops/watt rating than any x86 chip available. A six (6) MPC7455 CPU system with the Tundra Tsi890 with AltiVec support can deliver a massive amount of Gigaflops for rendering 32bit color values for images and movies. | | | Render Farm Machine MotherBoard - 4-way, 6-way, 8-way Motorola PPC MPC7455 CPU @1 GHz
- 1 - Tundra Tsi500: RapidIO 6 Port Switch
- 6 - Tundra Tsi890: PowerPC Universal Interconnect Switch (Northbridge)
- 6 - TI 1394b OHCI controllers (64bit 66mhz PCI) [available 2H 2002]
- 2 - Apple Key Largo ASICs (Southbridge, USB, IDE, ATA/100)
- 1 - PMU99 Power Management Controller
The chance that Apple would not deliver at least a Quad-Processor machine for a Render Farm focus is slim. It was reported to be the minimum arrangement for a render farm server requested of Apple from CIO's and CTO's of the big Hollywood studios at a recently held Studio Summit at Apple's main campus. But the main point of the specs above is to point out what is currently or soon to be available as far as building such a machine. The Tundra890 is a Northbridge chip with a 133mhz MPX/60X bus to connect to the G4 (MPC7455) CPU and the DDR333 memory controller, 1 RapidIO port, 2 Gigabit Ethernet Ports and a PCI/X bus to connect to I/O cards. To learn more see: http://www.tundra.com/tdc_files/images/80A7100_BK001_03.jpg Once again, our informed engineer-reader has detailed the technical specifications and discussed how the various subcomponents work. Thanks to Douglas Godfrey for the tech. info. Related Articles Apple Rack Mount: 6-way G5/G4 Server, Specs & Possibilities | |
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